Debt Bomb

by Michael Ginsberg

  “Honey, they’re kicking me out of the assisted living home,” Mamie said. “They said all the Medicare patients have to leave.”

  Andrea raised her arms up to the sky as if to say, Lord, what more do you plan to do to me?

  “They’re kicking you out now?” Andrea asked. “Not even giving you a week to move out?”

  “No,” Mamie said. “They’re moving someone into my apartment today.”

  Andrea looked out the window at the Oval Office. She wondered if the president was there. Maybe she could put him on the phone with the assisted living center’s management. Scare them into keeping her mother for at least a little longer. As tempting as it was, she knew it was ridiculous.

  “Okay, Mamie, stay there,” Andrea said. “I’m coming to get you.”

  Andrea told Rachel where she was going, ran out of the office, hopped into her Camry, and sped across the Potomac to the assisted living facility off Interstate 95. Traffic was so light Andrea got there in twenty minutes.

  When she arrived at the front driveway of the facility, a dystopian cross between a garage sale and a college dormitory move-in day greeted her. Furniture dotted the sidewalks. Armoires, chairs, and televisions were haphazardly strewn about. Suitcases were everywhere.

  Scattered about this jumble of possessions were elderly residents, or perhaps now former residents, of the facility. Some sat in wheelchairs covered in blankets. Others on crutches leaned against the columns holding up the driveway cover. A few stood on their own, hunched over or holding one another up. Some were crying, others stared straight ahead with a faraway, bewildered look. It was as if a natural disaster had blown through the building and left everyone homeless.

  Orderlies in white uniforms escorted residents out of the building in a miserable parade. An orderly would push an elderly person out of the building in a wheelchair, turn around, go back in, and push another poor soul out.

  In the chaos, Andrea found her mother at the end of the driveway, surrounded by her furniture, her clothes—all her worldly possessions dumped right there by the side of the driveway. The dining room table Andrea used to play hide-and-seek under. The ottoman where her parents hid the Passover Seder afikomen every year. The battered black leather rocking chair littered with strips of tape covering forty years of upholstery tears.

  “Good lord, Mamie, what happened? Did they just throw you out?”

  “Someone from the staff knocked at my door and said I’d have to leave if I wasn’t going to pay out of my own pocket for my room,” said Mamie. “I told them Medicare was paying the rent. As soon as they heard that, they brought some other old lady in. She looked out the window, said she liked the room and the view, and said she would take it. Next thing I knew two giant men were moving my stuff out and her stuff in.”

  “They threw you out because of the Medicare cuts?” Andrea asked.

  Mamie looked confused, as if she didn’t fully understand why this was happening. “The home said people who can pay their way out of pocket are like gold now. Nursing homes are fighting over them. The lady who took my room was paying completely out of pocket. The home said they couldn’t afford to lose her. So out I went.”

  “Is this all your stuff?” Andrea asked.

  “No, there’s more upstairs,” Mamie replied.

  “Okay, Mamie, you stay here while I go up and get it.”

  Andrea charged into the building. Going up to get her mother’s remaining things was just an excuse. She wanted to talk to the management. In the chaos of the lobby she saw a man in a sports coat and tie doing his best to direct the hordes of orderlies, nurses, movers, residents, and family members moving people out of the building.

  “Excuse me, are you Mr. Ingram? The general manager?”

  “I am, but I’m a little busy right now in case you can’t see.” Mr. Ingram didn’t even look at Andrea.

  “I’m Andrea Gartner,” Andrea said. “You’re evicting my mother.”

  Mr. Ingram stopped and looked Andrea up and down. “The Andrea Gartner?”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “Come here, I want to show you something.” He gestured toward the window in the home’s library. “You see this yard sale out here?” He pointed to the piles of household items strewn along the driveway with their hapless elderly owners standing around them in despair. “You created all of this with a stroke of your pen, Ms. Gartner. This is all your doing.”

  “I’m not going to get into a debate with you,” Andrea said, trying to resist taking the bait. “I’m here to get my mother, and you have no business throwing her out without so much as a day’s advance notice.”

  Mr. Ingram laughed. “You’re going to lecture me on what I need to do? Look at that woman by the curb holding the IV. She’s got pulmonary disease. Next to her, Mr. Hays? He has Parkinson’s. And that man next to your mother? Mr. McNally? Alzheimer’s. When you cut Medicare, you cut off their ability to pay for medication, physician care, and their rent here.” He jabbed his stubby finger at her. “All three of them will almost certainly die within the next two months. And those are just the first three I see. We’re kicking out people with diabetes, heart disease, and cancer who will be dead in three months. Some of them have no family to take care of them.”

  Andrea put her hand to her forehead, aghast at her handiwork. She knew the emergency budget was the right thing to do, but to confront it with her own eyes shook her resolve. Until now, the consequences of the emergency budget were all abstract, statistics in a spreadsheet. For the first time, the individual consequences of the emergency budget lay before her.

  The reality of what she had done had become inescapable: she had signed the death warrant for these poor souls. People were going to die because of her work. Years of budget indiscipline might have brought the country to this point, but it was she who had wielded the knife.

  Feeling dizzy and faint, she reached for a chair to balance herself. Was she any better than the horrible monsters of history who’d killed millions? Mao’s famines? Stalin’s purges? She was condemning tens, maybe hundreds of thousands or even millions to death or lives of abject penury. And arrayed before her was exactly what these condemned millions looked like.

  “Where are these folks going?” Andrea asked.

  “Do you give a damn?” Mr. Ingram snapped.

  “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.”

  “We’re sending the ones without family to a Red Cross shelter set up at Sudbrook Middle School.”

  “That abandoned school a few blocks from the subway?”

  “The very one.”

  “No one has used that building for twenty years,” Andrea said. “It’s falling apart. I drove past it a few weeks ago. There’s a tree growing through the left side of the building where part of the roof collapsed.”

  “That’s not the half of it,” Mr. Ingram said. “The Red Cross had to clean mold and rat feces from the gym. They couldn’t get all the mold off the ceiling, but with time running out, the health department decided to let the Red Cross set up anyway.”

  “What about that guy?” Andrea pointed to a man in a military shirt and cap with a chest full of medals.

  “That’s Colonel Hurst,” Mr. Ingram said. “Fought in Vietnam and Desert Storm. Wounded three times. He’s got dementia.”

  “You could send him to the VA hospital downtown,” Andrea said.

  “Fat chance he’ll get in,” Mr. Ingram huffed. “Half its staff has been laid off. They’ve got a list of veterans a mile long waiting for months for their appointments, and they told me they had to cancel most of them because their doctors or specialists had been laid off. They said they can’t even provide Colonel Hurst his medicines if he can’t pay out of pocket.”

  “Does he have family?”

  “No,” said Mr. Ingram. “Thanks to you he might just curl up in the parking lot and die.”

  Andrea searched in vain for words, unable to find a comeback. “I’m going to get my mother’s things,” she sai
d.

  Andrea went up to her mother’s apartment on the sixth floor. A tall woman in a white dress was visible through the open door. She was issuing commands to movers swirling about her, arranging furniture in the apartment. Three Louis Vuitton suitcases sat in the living room. The woman didn’t seem to need assisted living services as she barked orders; it was the movers who seemed exhausted and barely able to stand.

  The woman noticed her. “Are these bags yours?” She pointed to two large garbage bags on the kitchen counter.

  “Those must be my mother’s,” Andrea replied.

  “I’m sorry she has to leave,” the woman said unconvincingly. “I’d been waiting nine months for a place to open up here. They told me I had to take it or they’d find someone else. Apparently, there are a lot of people willing to pay the full price without Medicare to live here.”

  “You could have said ‘no’, you know,” Andrea said.

  “They weren’t going to let your mother stay no matter what. If it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else.”

  Andrea was in no mood to talk and grabbed the two garbage bags. “I’ll just take these and be on my way. Enjoy the apartment.”

  “I know I—”

  Andrea let the door slam shut without waiting for the woman to finish her sentence. She made her way to the curb to meet her mother. The moving company the home had arranged had arrived and was loading Mamie’s things into the moving van.

  “Mamie, I got the rest of your stuff,” she said. “Let the movers finish loading the truck. They can follow us home.”

  “I’m going to miss it here,” Mamie said, her head hanging. “I was just getting comfortable and getting to know people. This was all I had.”

  “That’s not true, Mamie,” she said. “You still have your family.”

  Andrea helped her mother out of her wheelchair and into the car. As she walked over to the driver’s seat, she glanced one last time at the assisted living home. Confused elderly patients wandered the sidewalk aimlessly, tripping over the vases and furniture and suitcases at their feet, unaware the author of their misfortune was only a few yards away.

  Andrea sped off, unable to look in her rearview mirror the entire way home.

  Acorn trembled as he descended the stairs to the cave. The narrow staircase was silent except for the metronomic dripping of condensation from two sharp points in the ceiling. The sinister drip-drip-drip felt like the ticking of a doomsday clock in an old war movie. Acorn could barely see in the darkness, broken only by a series of dim bulbs on the walls of the staircase.

  The Ministry had given him twenty-two years, practically an eternity in the spy world, to burrow deeply into the United States government. And when the time came to finally cash in that twenty-two-year investment and engineer the overthrow of the American government, Operation Pripyat was failing. People were losing jobs and homes and yet somehow Americans weren’t in the streets demanding revolution. Between families pooling resources, families simply learning to do without, and charities and philanthropists trying to fill the gaps, Americans were weathering the worst of the crisis.

  It was a disaster for a spy agency as precise and as fastidious as the Ministry.

  Acorn was certain Xu Li would be infuriated. He thought back to those times his father came home shell-shocked and his mother’s stern warning: “One must never cross Madame Xu.” But Acorn had done worse than cross Madame Xu. He had failed her.

  A rustle of leaves came from behind him. Acorn fitfully turned his head to see if someone was following him into the cave but saw no one. All he heard was the dripping of the condensation and his own breathing, growing heavier with every step.

  The cave was in its usual condition: spare and neat. Just the chair and the video screen and the small control panel on the wall to the right of the screen. The brown walls were damp from condensation, and the floor was swept clean of dust and debris. The single chair was perfectly positioned in its usual spot in front of the screen.

  Someone had to be maintaining the cave, which meant someone else knew about it. He stopped and looked around again to see if anyone had followed him inside. Still nothing.

  The red button on the control panel to the right of the screen was blinking slowly. Acorn had never seen it blinking before, and its slow blinking terrified him. It reminded him of the HAL 9000 computer’s red light in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It exuded coldness and purpose. It exuded Xu Li.

  Acorn tiptoed toward the red button, terrified of what might happen when he pushed it. Would it release a message? Would it open a video communication? Would it blow up the cave?

  He could barely control his trembling hand. He was on the verge of a full-body spasm, as if adrenaline had replaced the blood in his veins. Had the cave been larger, he would have run around it to burn off the terrified energy engulfing him. But the cramped cave offered little space, so he positioned his right hand in front of the red button and steadied it with his left hand. Then he closed his eyes, counted to three, and pushed the button.

  The projector bolted to the ceiling of the cave whirred to life. Acorn opened his eyes and saw the image of the same spartan room from which Xu Li had given him his last instructions projected on the screen. The Ministry must want to speak to him. Acorn closed his eyes and exhaled deeply. He was still alive.

  Acorn walked over to the wooden chair in the middle of the cave, but it looked uncomfortable, so he stood in front of it. Within two minutes Xu Li walked into the camera’s field of view and appeared on the screen. Acorn’s hands shook again. He rubbed his temples and realized they were moist with sweat.

  Xu Li looked no different than usual. Clad in her light blue Mao jacket, standing straight, expressionless, she remained the consummate inscrutable Communist apparatchik. Acorn had no idea if he was about to receive new instructions or die.

  “How is the American government surviving our debt crisis?” Xu Li said. No greeting. No introductory banter. All business.

  “Americans are somehow getting by and making due,” said Acorn meekly, knowing he was admitting his understanding of the American public, which he’d provided the Ministry, was wrong. He braced himself for Xu Li’s reaction.

  “We anticipated that.” Xu Li scowled. “You were supposed to make sure the emergency budget did not pass.”

  Thank goodness she can only see my face and torso, he thought. He could barely control the shaking in his right foot.

  “Tell me, Acorn, how was the emergency budget able to pass?”

  “Earl Murray and Andrea Gartner. They convinced Congress the country’s economy would collapse and the potential for revolution would be real if the emergency budget didn’t pass.”

  “Andrea Gartner is a mouse. Earl Murray is a weakling. Together they overcame your efforts with the senators and congressmen?”

  “Everything I told them about what would happen from the Social Security and Medicare cuts happened. People did lose their medications. People did get evicted from their homes. People have died left and right. Hundreds of thousands.”

  “If this is true, why is it not bringing about a revolution?”

  “I guess it’s the American mindset. They dig in and survive.”

  Xu Li leaned directly into camera with a dark look. “You allowed this operation to proceed knowing of the possibility Americans might not react as we expected?”

  In a panic, Acorn looked over his shoulder toward the entrance to the cave, unable to shake the thought that someone was approaching him from behind. He knew how the Ministry worked. But no one was there.

  “The American public is unpredictable. The American Congress more so.”

  Xu Li backed her head away from the camera. Acorn sensed she’d heard enough from him.

  “Very well, Acorn. We will try again. Return home. You will receive further instructions.”

  “Yes, Madame Xu.”

  The screen went blank.

  Acorn wiped the dripping sweat from his forehead. He peered at his hands t
o see how much sweat he’d wiped away and saw they were shaking badly. He looked around the cave. No flashing lights. No self-destruct countdown. He nervously looked up and down his body. No red dot from a laser sight.

  Come on, you’ve been watching too many spy movies.

  The brown rock of the cave walls was covered in its typical condensation.

  Never stay in one place too long. It makes you easy pickings.

  Acorn rushed out of the cave, still terrified the Ministry might initiate some self-destruct sequence.

  As he emerged from the cave into the night, he spun his head back and forth, looking for any sign someone might be watching him. His breathing was getting heavier. He tried to control it by using a breathing exercise the Ministry taught him, frightened his terrified heaving might reveal his presence.

  About fifty feet from his car, Acorn heard a rustle of leaves.

  An animal? A bird?

  He stopped and listened closely.

  Nothing.

  He resumed walking to the car and was about thirty feet away when he heard what sounded like a human whistle. His body shook as he turned his head frantically in every direction.

  Then he saw it, a light directly in front of him and across the road where he had parked his car. It wasn’t natural light, that much he knew. It was yellow, perhaps the glow of a sodium lamp or a flashlight. Acorn squinted and peered into the darkness.

  The light flashed three times.

  Jesus, there’s someone there and they’re signaling me!

  Alarmed, Acorn walked as fast as he could to his car. He thought about running but didn’t want his breathing to get louder. Leaves crunched under his feet, but he didn’t care. Someone had already found him. He needed to get out of here as quickly as possible.

  Finally, Acorn reached his car. He fumbled for his key fob. His hands were shaking so hard he dropped the fob as he pulled it out of his pocket. It hit the ground and he knelt to pick it up. On his knees, he very slowly turned one more time in the direction of the light, terrified whoever it was out there would now be right behind him.